Somewhere around 4 months ago, some friends of mine suggested ‘health month’ - a generic motivator to eat healthier and be more active. I got on board, agreeable fellow that I am, and stuck it out.

I would later learn that I was the only person that stuck it out for more than a week, but that’s neither here nor there.

Shortly after the month had ended, I decided I could take this idea further. I started running. I had dabbled in exercise before about a year ago and fell into the “did it for a month and a half, got bored, quit” category. There was nothing about this go-round that would keep me more honest; I had no expectations of success, but I decided to try anyway.

Three months later, and I’m still going.

There was a moment near the beginning when I thought I was going to throw in the towel. My knee got banged up, and I could barely walk. I was out of commission for two weeks - I would use the elliptical when I could, but ellipticals are boring. Then one day my knee repaired itself. There was no preamble, no gradual easing of pain: one day I couldn’t run and the next day I could.

There’s still pain from time to time, but it’s mostly endurable. Except that generally I can’t stand after sitting for a long time without feeling like the blood in my legs has hardened and is only slowly gaining its fluidity. Ow.

General progress: at the start of this, I could barely run a mile in 13 minutes. On a treadmill. After, I would need to take a couple days to rest. Now I can consistently run a 5K in under 10 minutes per mile outdoors. Generally I can do this multiple days in a row before needing to cool down for a day. A couple weeks ago I ran my first (slow) 10K.

Steam recently launched Greenlight, their “democratic” system where their community can vote on which games should be accepted onto Steam. Shortly after, to combat spam, they added a $100 fee to put games on Greenlight. And then my Twitter feed went bonkers crazy.

People with money said, “$100 isn’t all that much.” Then people without money said, “Yea, it is!” The camps got really hostile toward each other and wrote their respective hostile blog posts and really just bored me to death. My Twitter feed is for cute pictures of cats, not for this vitriol.

The side without money is raging over a non-issue. I haven’t seen a single example of someone who thought they had a game that could make it onto Steam who didn’t also have the money. The people doing the arguing don’t actually have games that they would submit to Steam. And if they did, I know of at least five developers who would loan them the money. Hell, I’ll loan them the money.

The side with money is defending a silly, arbitrary, and non-effective solution. If you’ve ever glanced at the Apple App Store or XBLIG, you know that $100 won’t stop someone from submitting their ehf-ing flashlight application. It’s a lazy bandaid to your arm when your cut is on your big toe.

But none of this addresses what I think of Greenlight as a whole, which is… meh.

Steam has always been a curated market, not a free-for-all App Store. I approve of this. Part of its success and allure to developers is that users expect to actually pay for things there; you go in with the understanding that the items that made it in have value. And the gatekeepers - Valve - were not unreasonable when letting smaller or outlandish games in.

Greenlight doesn’t change that. It just changes the curators from a respected company to entitled jackasses.

Theoretically, the community is supposed to be a gauge of whether people will buy your game, but once you look at the comments you know that you don’t want them gauging anything. It’s like taking the people who comment on iPhone games and giving them power. Anyone who’s looked at the comments on an iPhone game knows that these people shouldn’t have power. Of any sort. Ever. I’m pretty convinced that half the games currently on Steam would not be greenlit through this system.

It’s also in its infancy, which means common niceties - like robust sorting mechanisms and ways to foster discovery - don’t exist. I don’t know if those will come or not, but I’m not going to judge a platform based on what I think might come someday if I cross my fingers real tight. It’s not there, so Greenlight gets a red mark for it.

Valve implemented this system, at least in part, because they needed some help weeding out games. How then do we guarantee a professional, quality evaluation of a game without burying Valve?

There’s the XBLIG model - let actual developers do the rating instead of any schmuck off the street. I was never a big fan of that model, though, since it leads to big heads and quickly becomes a popularity contest.

My proposed model is closer to the App Store (god, did I just say that?). Keep the $100 fee, and use it to pay someone to critically look at the game. This hopefully lifts some of the burden of looking at thousands of games a year while maintaining the quality control that Steam targets.

In some of my spare time, I’ve been playing with the Unity game engine. It’s… good.

To paint with broad strokes: it’s a component-driven 3D engine with support for nearly every platform out there. It supports scripting in both C# (yay!) and JavaScript (meh!). It has tons of built in support for world building, animation, terrain, character controls, sound, etc, etc. Basically every high level system I could think of has some coverage, though some of it is lacking (I’ll get to that in a bit).

I was up & running with it in half an hour and felt competent enough to make a simple game. In another half hour, I felt competent enough to make a not so simple game. It’s really classy - you mix & match components on an entity to give the entity the desired behavior. If you declare a variable in a component, that variable is automatically exposed in the editor for real-time modification. Drag a bunch of building blocks together and you can have anything from a simple racing prototype to an FPS within a day.

I’m not really doing it justice with my shotgun overview. Just know that I’m pleased.

There is some bad here: 2D support is rubbish and GUI support is rubbisher. There are libraries for both, but they’re expensive and/or underwhelming. For an engine that gets so much love on mobile, 2D ought be a first class citizen and not the twisted cousin they keep locked in the attic. GUI is getting an overhaul shortly after 4.0 launches, though, so let’s cross our fingers.

Speaking of 4.0, the Mecanim integration looks delicious That’s all I’m going to say about that.

First, the site was starting to break down technically. The theme that I hacked together some 5 years ago wasn’t holding up, and plugins had mucked with it visually. That was demoralizing, and it didn’t make much sense to invest time in a space that was unappealing. I’ve switched to a generic WordPress theme which will hopefully hold up better; I expect this will evolve over time, but for now it’s good to have a new baseline.

Second, I had always resisted turning this into a purely technical blog. At the same time, I’ve grown an increasing distaste for discussing my personal life online. Those two conflicting interests clashed and kept me from having anything I felt valuable enough to put here. I’ve decided to simply pick a vision and run with it - this is primarily a game development/tech blog, and ramblings on other things are bonuses. You can keep those for free.

Third, it’s lonely writing without a cowriter. I haven’t solved that problem. But if you’re a game developer or a tech-minded lad/lass and would like to fill the role, tap me on the shoulder. In the meantime, I’ll deal with it.

For you, this means more posts and a more active presence on the site.